Enabling the Remote Workforce: Workspot and Applied Software

What do you love better than when a plan comes together? When two plans come together, together.

We've been reviewing the RCP 350 list of the top U.S. Microsoft partners over the past several months, and we've also been focusing on what ISVs, CSPs and other partners are doing to help their customers be better prepared for a hybrid future in which some people continue to work from home, some work in the office, and some go back and forth.

In this case, RCP 350 partner Workspot shared the story of one of its clients, Applied Software, and how they're strategizing for this distributed future.

About Workspot
Workspot took a good, hard look at everything customers didn't like about remote desktops and solved it. Customers liked virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), but found managing and running VDI complex and cumbersome. They liked the idea of a company that delivered VDI services for them, but found that most of those companies were small and had inadequate cloud installations and spotty networks. Also, depending on where the client was and where the provider was, latency could be a serious factor when you want a desktop experience similar to local networking.

The Workspot Enterprise Desktop Cloud platform delivers complete cloud desktops to any device anywhere. It deploys quickly, scales almost effortlessly, is operated by experienced professionals with years in the business, and operates on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Super-reliable, infinitely scalable cloud resources running on the most durable, resilient, high-speed networks in the world. Each user's cloud desktop is delivered from the provider's datacenter that's physically nearest them to minimize latency.

Workspot has a deep well of VDI legacy; the chairman of its board of directors is former Citrix CEO Mark Templeton.

Applied Software and Its Challenge
Founded in 1982, Applied Software Technology Inc. (ASTI) has grown to become one of the largest architecture, engineering, construction, fabrication and manufacturing system integrators in North America, providing a comprehensive array of solutions, services and consulting with a singular focus on helping clients achieve higher performance. Services include software, training, support, consulting and custom development.

Customers commonly use GPU-based systems to run ASTI's very high-end engineering applications. This works very well when everyone is collaborating in the office on their high-powered workstations. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic made that impossible. ASTI needed to find a way to enable customers equipped with their own laptops to continue to use the software, which had much higher demands.

ASTI's chosen solution was Workspot. Furnishing customers with Workspot subscriptions, ASTI located each user's workloads and cloud PC desktop in the Azure datacenter nearest them. It found it had all the control it needed over information governance, load balancing, performance monitoring and, ultimately, customer satisfaction. All the benefits of VDI without the headaches, and with the added flexibility to enable GPU-level performance in regular PCs.

Even the variations in configuration of customer devices didn't daunt ASTI. A user needed a specific NVIDIA driver for their display? No problem. Management and rationalization of storage? Made easy. Even the heaviest workload demands, including enormous graphic design files, were easily handled.

Planning for the Future
Foreseeing a coming staff shortage in their vertical industries, ASTI is already planning to help customers compensate for their lack of people power with more remote compute power using innovative techniques they've been building on the Workspot platform.

ASTI has given its customers the best of all possible worlds. Totally reliable infrastructure, totally resilient, full-availability, high-speed global network, and totally virtual control of the entire compute infrastructure. It plans to partner with Workspot to deliver its software for a long time to come.

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on February 03, 2022